Read More About David Williams From The Courier Journal.
David Williams' record: not just a 'no' man
Written by Andrew Wolfson
This is one in a series of stories about Kentucky’s statewide races for offices on the Nov. 8 ballot. A profile of Gov. Steve Beshear will appear next Sunday.
As a backbencher in the Kentucky Senate, young David Williams carved a reputation as the Democrats’ favorite Republican, supporting measures such as the Kentucky Education Reform Act and the massive tax increase to fund it.
After completing his first session as Senate president in 2000, he still offered a progressive vision:
“When we come up here, we have a responsibility to every child who’s in school, to every person who needs protection, every community that needs water, every university that needs funding, and every sick person who needs access” to health care, “and we accept that,” he said in an April 2000 interview.
But in 11 years as Senate leader, the greatest legacy of Williams, the Republican candidate for governor, may be what he has stymied, rather than what he has shepherded into law, say lawmakers of both parties.
Conservative supporters praise him for his role in ending public financing of gubernatorial elections, thwarting expanded gaming and blocking tax increases and the enlargement of government.
“He has stopped things that would have been bad for Kentucky,” said Louisville businessman Phil Moffett, who lost to Williams in the Republican primary and now supports him.
University of Kentucky political science professor Stephen Voss said: “His main role has been to obstruct, and I don’t mean that as an insult.”
But Democrats, including House Speaker Greg Stumbo, said that while Williams has a record of accomplishment in education issues, his legacy to voters is the gridlock in Frankfort that over the past 10 years has seen three regular sessions of the General Assembly end without a state budget.
During that period, Stumbo notes, “We have had three governors, two speakers, but only one Senate president.”
In an interview, Williams, 58, said that by saying no to House Democrats, he and other Senate Republicans have saved Kentucky from billions of dollars of additional debt and taxes, as well as the loss of thousands of jobs.
“It would have been easy for me to go along, to pass irresponsible budgets or not lower taxes,” he said.
Still, he said accusations that he is an obstructionist are ill-founded. He said his role in blocking casino gambling and video slots at racetracks, for example, has been wildly exaggerated.
“I haven’t been for it and won’t be for it,” he said, “but to say one person can stop it ... is to give one person more power than actually exists.”
Achievements
Williams cites as accomplishments his role in building bipartisan support in 2009 for Senate Bill 1, which scrapped the controversial Commonwealth Accountability Testing System — known as CATS – and replaced it with tests that make it easier to compare student results with national scores.
Williams also pointed to two less publicized measures. One was the Revised Uniform Anatomical Gift Act of 2010, which made organ donation procedures consistent across the state.
The second was a bill that established the now-11-year-old state Agency for Substance Abuse Policy, which last year, working through 75 local boards in 113 counties, allocated more than $1.9 million in grants to drug courts, treatment services, educational programs and law enforcement agencies.
Williams, a graduate of the University of Louisville law school, also said he’s been a friend to Jefferson County by helping secure money for the KFC Yum! Center and helping create the bi-state commission to build new Ohio River bridges.
And his constituents say he has secured money to build and improve roads in his Senate district — Cumberland and five other counties along the Tennessee border.
A lawyer from Burkesville, Williams served in the Kentucky House in 1985-86 before moving to the Senate in 1987. In his only other statewide race, he lost to Democratic incumbent U.S. Sen. Wendell Ford in a 1992 landslide.
Last May, running on a ticket with Agriculture Commissioner Richie Farmer, Williams defeated Moffett and Jefferson County Clerk Bobbie Holsclaw to win the GOP gubernatorial primary.
He says he and Farmer are running because Kentucky is adrift and many Kentuckians have given up hope of finding work and providing better opportunities for their children. He said the state needs “true conservative” leaders who provide “an agenda for progress” and “smaller, leaner government that helps more than it hurts.”
He did not have to give up his Senate seat to run, and if defeated he said he would finish his term, which runs through 2014. He would have to run for Senate president again in January 2013.
Political scientists, including Western Kentucky University’s Scott Lasley, said Williams’ greatest legacy is holding the Republican majority in the Senate and working to get GOP senators re-elected. Only one has lost to a Democrat during his presidency.
“He will be remembered for making Republicans relevant in state politics,” said Lasley, who chairs the Warren County Republican Party.
UK’s Voss said Williams — along with U.S. Senate Minority Leader and fellow Republican Mitch McConnell — has made Kentucky a two-party state, which he said is a healthy development.
“He is a party builder,” Voss said.
Moving to the right
Dashing the initial hopes of liberals, Williams has forged a solidly conservative record on a range of hot-button issues:
He supports the mining of coal through mountaintop removal, reflected by the “Friend of Coal” sticker on his used Lincoln Town Car.
The National Rifle Association Victory Fund gives him its highest grade. (He is licensed to carry a concealed weapon and says he does.)
He has been endorsed by the Kentucky Right to Life Association, whose executive director, Margie Montgomery, has said he is the most significant leader “the pro-life movement has ever had in Frankfort.” In the 2011 session, he fast-tracked a bill through the Senate that would have required doctors to show women an ultrasound of their fetus before performing an abortion. It did not pass the House.
Williams said he opposes abortion even for cases of rape and incest, and he likens it to murder: “If somebody shot my mother, I would want to kill them, but I don’t think that is the appropriate thing to do. We have laws against murder.”
Williams said he has friends who are gay but that he stands behind his 2008 statement that homosexuality is “aberrant behavior.” The Kentucky Equality Federation says no pro-gay legislation has passed the Senate under his watch. That includes a bill that flew through the House 99-0 last year that would have given members of same-sex couples the right to visit each other in the hospital. (Some hospitals have barred visits by people not related to an incapacitated patient by blood or marriage.)
Williams said he doesn’t discriminate against gays but doesn’t think they deserve “special legal status” and would rescind Gov. Steve Beshear’s executive order barring the hiring or firing of state employees based on their sexual orientation, gender identity and other characteristics.
Williams said he supports the right of individuals to join unions, but his campaign plan to revive the economy would let residents of individual counties vote to adopt local right-to-work ordinances and do away with prevailing-wage laws. Both measures are opposed by unions, and the Williams-Farmer ticket has been endorsed by only one labor organization, the state Fraternal Order of Police.
Bucking expectations
But Williams’ record also includes surprises.
In 2007, he voted to raise the state minimum wage, saying at the time that he’d voted against an increase years earlier in the House and had regretted it since. In an interview, he said that as a former dishwasher, bouncer, short-order cook and warehouse guard, he knows what it’s like to work for low wages.
In 2009, he came out in favor of a statewide ban on smoking in public places, calling it a workplace-safety issue rather than a matter of private property rights, as many conservatives maintain. In an interview, Williams, who doesn’t smoke, said he thinks smoking contributed to a series of strokes suffered by his father, Lewis P. Williams, the longtime Cumberland County clerk who died in 2006.
That same year, over the objections of some conservatives, Williams helped pass a bill stiffening enforcement of Kentucky’s seat-belt law, and two years later he voted for a measure requiring that small children be placed in booster seats.
He said both measures have saved lives and that a cousin who ran a hospital emergency room in Louisville told him about patients who would have survived had they been restrained.
In 2009 he voted to double the tax on cigarettes to 60 cents a pack and introduce a 6 percent tax on beer, wine and liquor, prompting then-blogger and now U.S. Sen. Rand Paul to write that Williams “apparently drank the Democrat Kool-Aid and accepts their argument that Kentucky has a budget shortfall.”
Williams said then that he had a “a constitutional duty to provide sources of funds to carry out what government is supposed to do,” and adds now that he successfully fought to reduce the cigarette tax hike.
Sen. Gerald Neal, D-Louisville, and others said that Williams also deserves praise for easing through the Senate this year the corrections-reform legislation that reduced prison costs by $42 million a year, in part by steering non-violent offenders to drug and alcohol treatment, rather than incarceration.
“This is one of the best days in the 26 years I've been up here,” Williams said when it passed.
Democrats and Republicans alike say Williams has supported reading and math intervention in the schools and adult literacy programs.
Defending his vote on the school reform act in 1990 — and the $1.2 billion tax increase that accompanied it — Williams said at the time that “some things are more important than politics, and the children … are one of those things.”
Now he says he voted for KERA because the legislature was under a state Supreme Court order to make changes and that in retrospect it turned out to be “one of the worst votes on tax policy that has ever been initiated” because it drove away some companies and made it harder to recruit new ones.
“I didn’t understand what it would do to business,” he said.
Williams said he made another miscalculation when he failed over several sessions to push through a bill that would have put a constitutional amendment on the ballot to limit damages in medical malpractice cases. He said it never had enough support to pass and he should have sought a compromise that didn’t require changing the constitution. But he said he has no regrets about his key role in 2002 in scrapping public financing for political campaigns — “welfare for politicians,” he called it — despite Beshear’s 4-1 edge in fundraising dollars in this year’s governor’s race.
Williams was criticized for opposing casino gambling when records in his divorce from his first wife showed he reported gambling losses of $36,417 from 1999 to 2002. But he said patronizing casinos himself was not hypocritical, because he opposes casinos in Kentucky not on moral grounds but because they don’t create good jobs and can corrupt state politics.
Call to end busing
Williams has continued to wrangle with education issues.
Last year under his leadership the Senate refused to act on a bill supported by Beshear that would have raised the high school dropout age to 18. Williams said it would have been expensive and there is no proof it would raise the graduation rate.
This year Williams quickly pushed through the Senate a measure that would have guaranteed children the right to attend the school closest to their home, over the fierce objections of Democrats and Jefferson County educators, who warned it would unravel decades of desegregation. The bill, which died in a House committee, also would have allowed charter schools.
Williams has called Jefferson County’s student-assignment plan “a failed social experiment” and said the money used for busing could be better spent in troubled schools. He also has said parents and grandparents could be more involved in children’s education if their school were closer to home.
Neal said the legislation seemed like a “cynical” ploy to curry favor with parents weary of busing and that it “fostered division” in the community.
Williams’ plan to create new jobs calls for measures that have long been popular with conservatives, such as a moratorium on new regulations, eliminating “junk lawsuits” against doctors, tax cuts for industries and a local right-to-work option, as well as replacing the corporate and personal income tax with a tax on consumption to make Kentucky more attractive to business.
“You should not tax productivity,” Williams said.
Economists say consumption taxes, including sales taxes, are regressive because they disproportionately affect the poor, who tend to spend more of their money. But Williams said they are not as bad as the alternative — income taxes, which he says prompt businesses to locate elsewhere.
“The most regressive tax is one that keeps you from having a job,” he said.
Written by Andrew Wolfson
This is one in a series of stories about Kentucky’s statewide races for offices on the Nov. 8 ballot. A profile of Gov. Steve Beshear will appear next Sunday.
As a backbencher in the Kentucky Senate, young David Williams carved a reputation as the Democrats’ favorite Republican, supporting measures such as the Kentucky Education Reform Act and the massive tax increase to fund it.
After completing his first session as Senate president in 2000, he still offered a progressive vision:
“When we come up here, we have a responsibility to every child who’s in school, to every person who needs protection, every community that needs water, every university that needs funding, and every sick person who needs access” to health care, “and we accept that,” he said in an April 2000 interview.
But in 11 years as Senate leader, the greatest legacy of Williams, the Republican candidate for governor, may be what he has stymied, rather than what he has shepherded into law, say lawmakers of both parties.
Conservative supporters praise him for his role in ending public financing of gubernatorial elections, thwarting expanded gaming and blocking tax increases and the enlargement of government.
“He has stopped things that would have been bad for Kentucky,” said Louisville businessman Phil Moffett, who lost to Williams in the Republican primary and now supports him.
University of Kentucky political science professor Stephen Voss said: “His main role has been to obstruct, and I don’t mean that as an insult.”
But Democrats, including House Speaker Greg Stumbo, said that while Williams has a record of accomplishment in education issues, his legacy to voters is the gridlock in Frankfort that over the past 10 years has seen three regular sessions of the General Assembly end without a state budget.
During that period, Stumbo notes, “We have had three governors, two speakers, but only one Senate president.”
In an interview, Williams, 58, said that by saying no to House Democrats, he and other Senate Republicans have saved Kentucky from billions of dollars of additional debt and taxes, as well as the loss of thousands of jobs.
“It would have been easy for me to go along, to pass irresponsible budgets or not lower taxes,” he said.
Still, he said accusations that he is an obstructionist are ill-founded. He said his role in blocking casino gambling and video slots at racetracks, for example, has been wildly exaggerated.
“I haven’t been for it and won’t be for it,” he said, “but to say one person can stop it ... is to give one person more power than actually exists.”
Achievements
Williams cites as accomplishments his role in building bipartisan support in 2009 for Senate Bill 1, which scrapped the controversial Commonwealth Accountability Testing System — known as CATS – and replaced it with tests that make it easier to compare student results with national scores.
Williams also pointed to two less publicized measures. One was the Revised Uniform Anatomical Gift Act of 2010, which made organ donation procedures consistent across the state.
The second was a bill that established the now-11-year-old state Agency for Substance Abuse Policy, which last year, working through 75 local boards in 113 counties, allocated more than $1.9 million in grants to drug courts, treatment services, educational programs and law enforcement agencies.
Williams, a graduate of the University of Louisville law school, also said he’s been a friend to Jefferson County by helping secure money for the KFC Yum! Center and helping create the bi-state commission to build new Ohio River bridges.
And his constituents say he has secured money to build and improve roads in his Senate district — Cumberland and five other counties along the Tennessee border.
A lawyer from Burkesville, Williams served in the Kentucky House in 1985-86 before moving to the Senate in 1987. In his only other statewide race, he lost to Democratic incumbent U.S. Sen. Wendell Ford in a 1992 landslide.
Last May, running on a ticket with Agriculture Commissioner Richie Farmer, Williams defeated Moffett and Jefferson County Clerk Bobbie Holsclaw to win the GOP gubernatorial primary.
He says he and Farmer are running because Kentucky is adrift and many Kentuckians have given up hope of finding work and providing better opportunities for their children. He said the state needs “true conservative” leaders who provide “an agenda for progress” and “smaller, leaner government that helps more than it hurts.”
He did not have to give up his Senate seat to run, and if defeated he said he would finish his term, which runs through 2014. He would have to run for Senate president again in January 2013.
Political scientists, including Western Kentucky University’s Scott Lasley, said Williams’ greatest legacy is holding the Republican majority in the Senate and working to get GOP senators re-elected. Only one has lost to a Democrat during his presidency.
“He will be remembered for making Republicans relevant in state politics,” said Lasley, who chairs the Warren County Republican Party.
UK’s Voss said Williams — along with U.S. Senate Minority Leader and fellow Republican Mitch McConnell — has made Kentucky a two-party state, which he said is a healthy development.
“He is a party builder,” Voss said.
Moving to the right
Dashing the initial hopes of liberals, Williams has forged a solidly conservative record on a range of hot-button issues:
He supports the mining of coal through mountaintop removal, reflected by the “Friend of Coal” sticker on his used Lincoln Town Car.
The National Rifle Association Victory Fund gives him its highest grade. (He is licensed to carry a concealed weapon and says he does.)
He has been endorsed by the Kentucky Right to Life Association, whose executive director, Margie Montgomery, has said he is the most significant leader “the pro-life movement has ever had in Frankfort.” In the 2011 session, he fast-tracked a bill through the Senate that would have required doctors to show women an ultrasound of their fetus before performing an abortion. It did not pass the House.
Williams said he opposes abortion even for cases of rape and incest, and he likens it to murder: “If somebody shot my mother, I would want to kill them, but I don’t think that is the appropriate thing to do. We have laws against murder.”
Williams said he has friends who are gay but that he stands behind his 2008 statement that homosexuality is “aberrant behavior.” The Kentucky Equality Federation says no pro-gay legislation has passed the Senate under his watch. That includes a bill that flew through the House 99-0 last year that would have given members of same-sex couples the right to visit each other in the hospital. (Some hospitals have barred visits by people not related to an incapacitated patient by blood or marriage.)
Williams said he doesn’t discriminate against gays but doesn’t think they deserve “special legal status” and would rescind Gov. Steve Beshear’s executive order barring the hiring or firing of state employees based on their sexual orientation, gender identity and other characteristics.
Williams said he supports the right of individuals to join unions, but his campaign plan to revive the economy would let residents of individual counties vote to adopt local right-to-work ordinances and do away with prevailing-wage laws. Both measures are opposed by unions, and the Williams-Farmer ticket has been endorsed by only one labor organization, the state Fraternal Order of Police.
Bucking expectations
But Williams’ record also includes surprises.
In 2007, he voted to raise the state minimum wage, saying at the time that he’d voted against an increase years earlier in the House and had regretted it since. In an interview, he said that as a former dishwasher, bouncer, short-order cook and warehouse guard, he knows what it’s like to work for low wages.
In 2009, he came out in favor of a statewide ban on smoking in public places, calling it a workplace-safety issue rather than a matter of private property rights, as many conservatives maintain. In an interview, Williams, who doesn’t smoke, said he thinks smoking contributed to a series of strokes suffered by his father, Lewis P. Williams, the longtime Cumberland County clerk who died in 2006.
That same year, over the objections of some conservatives, Williams helped pass a bill stiffening enforcement of Kentucky’s seat-belt law, and two years later he voted for a measure requiring that small children be placed in booster seats.
He said both measures have saved lives and that a cousin who ran a hospital emergency room in Louisville told him about patients who would have survived had they been restrained.
In 2009 he voted to double the tax on cigarettes to 60 cents a pack and introduce a 6 percent tax on beer, wine and liquor, prompting then-blogger and now U.S. Sen. Rand Paul to write that Williams “apparently drank the Democrat Kool-Aid and accepts their argument that Kentucky has a budget shortfall.”
Williams said then that he had a “a constitutional duty to provide sources of funds to carry out what government is supposed to do,” and adds now that he successfully fought to reduce the cigarette tax hike.
Sen. Gerald Neal, D-Louisville, and others said that Williams also deserves praise for easing through the Senate this year the corrections-reform legislation that reduced prison costs by $42 million a year, in part by steering non-violent offenders to drug and alcohol treatment, rather than incarceration.
“This is one of the best days in the 26 years I've been up here,” Williams said when it passed.
Democrats and Republicans alike say Williams has supported reading and math intervention in the schools and adult literacy programs.
Defending his vote on the school reform act in 1990 — and the $1.2 billion tax increase that accompanied it — Williams said at the time that “some things are more important than politics, and the children … are one of those things.”
Now he says he voted for KERA because the legislature was under a state Supreme Court order to make changes and that in retrospect it turned out to be “one of the worst votes on tax policy that has ever been initiated” because it drove away some companies and made it harder to recruit new ones.
“I didn’t understand what it would do to business,” he said.
Williams said he made another miscalculation when he failed over several sessions to push through a bill that would have put a constitutional amendment on the ballot to limit damages in medical malpractice cases. He said it never had enough support to pass and he should have sought a compromise that didn’t require changing the constitution. But he said he has no regrets about his key role in 2002 in scrapping public financing for political campaigns — “welfare for politicians,” he called it — despite Beshear’s 4-1 edge in fundraising dollars in this year’s governor’s race.
Williams was criticized for opposing casino gambling when records in his divorce from his first wife showed he reported gambling losses of $36,417 from 1999 to 2002. But he said patronizing casinos himself was not hypocritical, because he opposes casinos in Kentucky not on moral grounds but because they don’t create good jobs and can corrupt state politics.
Call to end busing
Williams has continued to wrangle with education issues.
Last year under his leadership the Senate refused to act on a bill supported by Beshear that would have raised the high school dropout age to 18. Williams said it would have been expensive and there is no proof it would raise the graduation rate.
This year Williams quickly pushed through the Senate a measure that would have guaranteed children the right to attend the school closest to their home, over the fierce objections of Democrats and Jefferson County educators, who warned it would unravel decades of desegregation. The bill, which died in a House committee, also would have allowed charter schools.
Williams has called Jefferson County’s student-assignment plan “a failed social experiment” and said the money used for busing could be better spent in troubled schools. He also has said parents and grandparents could be more involved in children’s education if their school were closer to home.
Neal said the legislation seemed like a “cynical” ploy to curry favor with parents weary of busing and that it “fostered division” in the community.
Williams’ plan to create new jobs calls for measures that have long been popular with conservatives, such as a moratorium on new regulations, eliminating “junk lawsuits” against doctors, tax cuts for industries and a local right-to-work option, as well as replacing the corporate and personal income tax with a tax on consumption to make Kentucky more attractive to business.
“You should not tax productivity,” Williams said.
Economists say consumption taxes, including sales taxes, are regressive because they disproportionately affect the poor, who tend to spend more of their money. But Williams said they are not as bad as the alternative — income taxes, which he says prompt businesses to locate elsewhere.
“The most regressive tax is one that keeps you from having a job,” he said.
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